The Longreads Blog
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Paul Auster opens up about his life and work:
Academics theorize endlessly about Auster and his literary motivations, labeling him everything from a New York Jewish hunger artist to a clever semiotician whose every decision — down to the color of the notebook his protagonists choose to write in — is fraught with symbolism. Auster dismisses most of this as academic overanalyzing, usually with a hidden agenda.
‘So many of these people have a point of view, a position, and are trying to articulate this position by using me as an example. But I myself, living within myself, never try to put labels on what I do. I just follow my nose.
‘I’m a man of contradictions, you know; I can’t say any one thing about myself. Yes,’ he says with a laugh, ‘I’m the hunger artist who likes to eat.’
“The Solitude of Invention.” — Stacey Kors, Columbia Magazine
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: GQ, Allure magazine, The Rumpus, 5280 Magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Scott Young.
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A writer and his wife participate in a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition known as “Wife-Carrying,” a sport where male competitors carry a female teammate while racing through an obstacle course:
And then my wife and I are 15 yards up the hill, and I am breathing hard, making it work. This isn’t so bad, I think. Like John Candy in Spaceballs, I say to myself, ‘I could carry two or three of these.’ Maybe a wife and a kid (that’s not allowed yet).
‘Divot,’ Megan shouts. I adjust. I’m a quarter of the way through. I’m a Wife-Carrying natural! This is the best decision that I, no that we, have made in… and I’m pitching forward into a swampy patch of October grass. Just like that, I’d broken a vow I’d made to my father-in-law. As if to maximize the surreal quality of this day, he’d driven up to watch the competition, and now I’d dropped his daughter. Seven-second penalty.
‘It’s a lot more physical than people give it credit for,’ Darcy Morse, the organizer of the race, warned when I signed up, and all at once I believe her. Suddenly, I feel like John Candy in Spaceballs. But I throw Megan onto my back again and come to the first obstacle, the Pommel Log. I’m over it, but I’m behind the couple we’re racing against, and starting to hear sympathy cheers. ‘You can do it,’ say some good-hearted Mainers with the sweet inflection of wincing, hopeful mommies.
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“Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It.” — David Kaiser, Lovisa Stannow, New York Review of Books
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An oral history of the Beltway sniper attacks that occurred during three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed, three people were injured, and many people were too afraid to leave their homes:
Iran Brown, victim, now 23: ‘I remember every detail, down to what I ate for breakfast: chocolate-chip waffles. My aunt drove me to school, and it was very early because she had to go to work. I was the first to arrive.
‘I got hit right under my left chest. I fell to the ground. A teacher came out to help me. I had my hand over the wound, but it wasn’t like in the movies with blood gushing out. I explained that I’d been shot and needed help, but it didn’t seem to register in her brain.
‘My aunt heard the shot and reversed the car when she saw me on the ground. I got up on my own and walked to the car. Of course, I’m panicking and praying. Reality is kicking in. My aunt was a nurse, so she knew more than the average person. She rushed me to a clinic.
‘I had been watching the news. I was aware of what was happening. I had asked our PE teacher why we were going outside if the sniper was in the area.
“Terror in October: A Look Back at the DC Sniper Attacks.” — Alicia C. Shepard, Washingtonian
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Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level:
By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe.
In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama’s role in the auto bailout—or Romney’s outsourcing past.
“Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive.” — Timothy Murphy, Mother Jones
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Did the feds break up a dangerous terror plot in Cleveland—or did they manufacture a threat from a group of impressionable Occupy followers?
The crux of the Cleveland Five’s defense will likely rest on whether Azir’s aggressive role in the crime constituted entrapment – a strategy which Baxter’s defense attorney John Pyle foreshadowed at an early court appearance. ‘They couldn’t blow their noses, let alone blow up a bridge,’ he said of his clients, ‘were it not for what this provocateur did.’ Yet the government has had no problem overcoming the entrapment defense to win convictions in similar cases. The legal definition of entrapment is actually rather narrow: Even though enticing people into committing crimes might seem unjust, that doesn’t make it unlawful. Prosecutors typically argue that defendants’ histories show they were predisposed to commit the crime. And juries frightened by the magnitude of the foiled plots are inclined to bring down the hammer.
In the case of the Cleveland Five, defense attorneys have also signaled their intention to reveal Azir’s extensive criminal history, which could undermine his credibility. Azir has been causing prosecutors plenty of headaches since the arrests. After his identity was outed by the Smoking Gun, the FBI scuttled him into the witness-protection program, reportedly in response to a threat. But living life under federal protection hasn’t kept him out of trouble. In May, Azir – who still faces two outstanding bad-check cases he picked up during his time with Occupy – was arrested in Cuyahoga County for theft. He’s out on $5,000 bail.
“The Plot Against Occupy.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone
A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind
A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind
There’s a good profile of the band Grizzly Bear by Nitsuh Abebe with the headline-as-question: “Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?” Spoiler: not much. Everyone who’s interested in making a living in the music business and what it means to be “big” in the indie scene should give it a read. (I was a little surprised how much their rundown read like Steve Albini’s classic “some of your friends are already this fucked.”)
What’s truly strange to me is how divorced these guys seem to be from the old-school music notion of writing “a hit” — a song that moves units, yes, but also moves asses (and hearts) — while simultaneously being baffled by why their songs aren’t played on the radio.
“I’ve always thought we write pop music,” Ed Droste says. “I think songs of ours could be on the radio. They’re not.”
Having actually listened to their music (I’m in the “suffocatingly fuss[y]” camp), this is baffling to me.
Austin Kleon on Nitsuh Abebe’s Grizzly Bear profile in New York magazine (featured yesterday on Longreads), and what it means to “write hits.” Some additional background from Abebe here.

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